There is a particular beauty to Whidbey and Camano Islands in spring, one that does not announce itself loudly.
It arrives in gestures: the first blush of rhododendrons beneath cedar boughs, a hillside turning chartreuse after rain, the scent of damp earth near a nursery greenhouse, the glint of water below a small-town street lined with galleries and flower boxes. It is a season of becoming. Not quite winter, not yet summer, but something gentler and, in many ways, more beautiful than either.
To visit the islands in spring is to encounter them in a quieter register. The ferries feel less hurried. The roads feel unclaimed. The cafés still have room by the window. The gardens are beginning to wake, and so, somehow, are you.
Whidbey and Camano are not simply places of scenic overlooks and shoreline drives. They are also islands of cultivation, of gardens, formal and informal, native and artistic, practical and poetic. Here, a garden may be a woodland path lined with blooms, a nursery that feels like an outdoor studio, or a sculpture trail where the forest itself seems to have become part of the installation.
And in spring, all of it feels especially alive.
A landscape of many kinds of gardens
The grand bloom garden
At Meerkerk Gardens in Greenbank, spring arrives in waves.
This is the island’s great floral overture: rhododendrons and azaleas beginning to glow through the woodland like lanterns, blooms appearing not all at once but in a slow, unfolding conversation with the season. The paths wind through both formal display areas and more natural woodland spaces and walking them feels less like checking off a destination than entering a mood.
If you are someone who loves the old romance of spring, soft color, cool air, and the sense that something is just beginning, this is where you start.
Meerkerk Gardens
3531 Meerkerk Ln, Greenbank, WA 98253
www.meerkerkgardens.org
The nursery gardens
At Bayview Garden and Venture Out Plant Nursery, the garden becomes something more relaxed and intimate.
These are not formal botanical gardens. They are places of inspiration, where potted hellebores, tulips, herbs, flowering shrubs, and mossy stone pathways create a kind of living design language. They are places to wander without urgency, to pick up ideas as much as plants, and to feel, even briefly, like the sort of person who spends an afternoon rearranging a garden bench or choosing just the right camellia.
In early spring, these spaces feel especially tender, full of possibility, lightly perfumed, and touched by the creative domesticity that is so much a part of island life.
Bayview Garden
2780 Marshview Ave, Langley, WA 98260
www.bayviewgarden.com
Venture Out Plant Nursery
3693 E Scriven Ln, Langley, WA 98260
ventureoutnursery.com
The native and ecological garden
At Bonhoeffer Botanical Gardens, the spring experience is quieter and more contemplative.
This is not a place of maximal bloom. It is a place of attention…to native plants, to pollinators, to the delicate architecture of what belongs here naturally. In early spring, that means emerging greens, subtle textures, birdsong, and the kind of beauty that asks you to slow down enough to notice it.
There is something deeply island-like about this kind of garden. It does not perform for you. It invites you in.
Bonhoeffer Botanical Gardens
2420 300th St NW, Stanwood, WA 98292
plc215.org
The art garden
On Whidbey and Camano, gardens are often inseparable from art.
At Rob Schouten Gallery & Sculpture Garden in Langley, sculpture and cultivated landscape meet in a way that feels completely natural to the island’s creative spirit. It is intimate, handmade, and quietly transporting, a place where the line between gallery and garden seems to dissolve.
And then there is Price Sculpture Forest near Coupeville, which may be one of the most moving expressions of the island’s imagination anywhere on Whidbey.
Here, the idea of a garden becomes something larger and more elemental. Sculptures appear along forest paths, amid cedar, moss, ferns, and filtered light, as if they had been discovered rather than installed. In early spring, when the forest floor begins to glow with new green, and the air still holds the hush of winter lifting, it feels almost dreamlike…part sanctuary, part outdoor gallery, part storybook.
This is one of the great gifts of the islands: the sense that art is not separate from the landscape but grown from it.
Rob Schouten Gallery & Sculpture Garden
101 Anthes Ave, Langley, WA 98260
www.robschoutengallery.com
Price Sculpture Forest
678 Parker Rd, Coupeville, WA 98239
sculptureforest.org
The town garden
Even the towns themselves seem to bloom in spring.
Langley and Coupeville are not gardens in the formal sense, but in spring, they begin to feel like them. Window boxes reappear. The gardens along the streets come back to life. Sidewalks soften under marine light. The whole streetscape seems to shift from introspection into invitation.
And perhaps that is part of what makes these islands so memorable: beauty is not confined to a single destination. It appears in the towns, the inns, the nurseries, the galleries, and the small moments between them.
